Guest author Shay West, interview, review, and contest

My interview guest today is Shay West, the author of the Portals of Destiny series and the Adventures of Alexis Davenport series. She has also been published in several anthologies: Battlespace (military sci-fi), Orange Karen: Tribute to a Warrior (fundraiser), and Ancient New (steampunk/fantasy).

Shay stepped away from teaching her biology students about microbes to talk about her life, writing, and her new book, Organ Reapers.

What was your first car?I had a little silver Honda Accord. I seriously loved that car! I had to get a job first so I could pay my parents back but it was worth it.

Star Wars, Star Trek, or Firefly?Oh my goodness, I am not sure if there’s any way I can choose. But I do have three Star Trek tattoos so I guess that sort of settles it 😉

As a child (or now!), what did you want to be when you grew up?I always wanted to be an astronaut. I love the idea of exploring space, heading out into the great unknown, to feel the shaking of the ship as it exits our atmosphere. which is weird since I am actually a chicken and have a list of ways I don’t want to die (one of which is getting sucked out the airlock of a space ship).

What is the single biggest challenge of creating the settings in your novels?Making sure they are accurate. This is one of the reasons I like to use fictional settings, even in my urban fantasy novels. I describe a city without naming it so that it can be any city in any state. I think that makes the reader feel closer to the story if they can picture the setting as something they are familiar with. But even with fictional settings, it’s important to have a document on the computer or a folder where you have every detail written down so that you can convince the reader it’s real.

About Dr. Shay West

Shay West was born in Longmont, CO and earned a doctorate degree in Human Medical Genetics from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical. Dr. West currently lives in Grand Junction, CO with her two cats. When not writing novels, she plays with plushie microbes and teaches biology classes at Colorado Mesa University. You can contact her at the following links:

Detective Elliott “Eli” Robinson and his new partner, Ava Aguilar, are baffled by a series of brutal murders happening in their fair city.No evidence, no eyewitnesses…only mutilated corpses with missing internal organs.When Eli and Ava stumble on evidence of similar gruesome crimes around the globe, they realize there is more to the murders, but the answers continue to elude them. In a race against time, Eli and Ava must figure out who is behind the killings and stop them before more people die.But the answers will take them out of their comfort zone and into the realm of the fantastic: another world with a different set of rules, and a leader who has no qualms about killing.

Once I wrote a book that started out by alternating between two different stories, which slowly converged until they merged. At least, that was the plan. I was lucky enough to have a brilliant editor who told me—repeatedly and forcefully—that the stories had to have the same tone, had to feel like they were part of the same book, even before they merged together. So when I read Shay West’s new release, Organ Reapers, I was torn between empathy for how hard the two-story merge is, and the wish that she’d had the same editor.

Organ Reapers is actually two separate books told in alternating chapters. The first is a soft, slightly dreamy YA/sci-fi about a young couple from a primitive society who are sent by their priests and their gods to “harvest” organs. As that consists of murdering people on other worlds, the couple are soon so conflicted and guilty that they decide to run away, even though that means dire consequences for their families. The other story is a fairly gritty police procedural involving a damaged detective and his beautiful partner who try to figure out why corpses keep turning up with organs missing.

Both stories have good descriptions and solid writing. But for me, there were two overwhelming problems. First, as I’ve said, the two parts are dissimilar in tone, pace, and feel. The second problem is that in order to fit them together, a LOT of stuff is left out. For example, Eli (the damaged detective) reveals in very short order that his wife was unfaithful, and his divorce has led to drinking and poor job performance. A nanosecond later, we’ve breezed through the obligatory “but I always work alone” scene, and he’s lusting after his gorgeous new partner, Ava. What we do not find out, is what Eli looks like. Or what his psychic ability to solve every case he’s ever had is all about. Or even what city he works for. Or why that city should be disproportionately targeted for organ harvesting.

In the case of the young otherworld couple, Keena and Tani, we find out that family is all-important, love is good (in a forbidden or at least platonic way), and you do your god-given duty even when it sucks because…well, gods gave it to you. But we don’t find out where the magic machine comes from that transports them to our world, or what technology allows primitive people to do complex organ transplants, or why murder seems to be the chosen approach as opposed to seeking donors.

I wavered between two and three stars for this book. But I decided to go with three stars because when the two mismatched couples do get together, the story picks up. At first it’s amusing to see Keena and Tani try to get by in our gritty urban world. Then it’s equally entertaining to see Eli and Ava attempt to understand their medieval world with priests who derive power because they speak directly for gods. As the action level increases, the stakes go up. Each couple has to choose whether to stop the killing or risk death for themselves or someone they love. All four face the very real possibility that they will not make it back to their own world. And everyone has to decide whether to act for the greater good, or in their own best interest.

Shay West has written several YA sci-fi tales, and her writing is clean, solid, and professional. While I think that Organ Reapers is not as successful a tale as a writer of her experience and caliber could have produced, it is an entertaining pair of (slightly-mismatched) stories.

**I received this book for free from the publisher or author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.**

LIE-DAR CONTEST!

For this week’s contest, I asked Shay how, based on something you’ve already done, might you make it into the Guinness Book of World Records? For a chance to win a copy of her new release, Organ Reapers, please guess which of the following is her answer and enter it in the comments below. Good luck!

Biggest 80’s hair

Largest collection of plush microbes

Biggest tough guy movie collection

Good luck!

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Just commenting that over the past week, I’ve been engaged in multiple arguments, I mean, discussions on internet book reviews and the star rating system but this review is an example of what a review should look like.

I think Ms. Hale wasn’t just controversial. She was over-the-line stalking and in a sprint toward jail time. But I get it. After my first book was filleted by the bitches you quote above, I couldn’t decide if I should just never write again, or wait until I’d sent the flame response first. I was lucky enough to have brilliant folk at my publishers to talk me off the ledge. But it’s really, really hard. I felt like I’d just taken my beautiful child out in public and someone spit on her.

I like that she had to get a job before her parents bought her a car. My eight-year-old asked me recently if she can get her drivers license and a car when she’s 16. I told her ‘yes’ to the license and I will get her a car if she has a job. She’s always trying to think of ways to earn money and have a business. Really, at eight. 🙂

I grew up in the California suburbs where, on or about your sixteenth birthday, a hand reached down from the heavens and handed you a set of keys. In my case, it was to Gus, a 1956 VW bug with a manual transmission that we bought from our neighbor for $50. Gus didn’t have a gas gauge (when he started to cough, I had to bend down and kick over a little lever that my legs weren’t long enough to reach, engaging the reserve tank). Plus his strongest gear was reverse, so I climbed many a mountain road going backwards. But he was a CONVERTIBLE. So, as a teenage Californian, he was the best car I could imagine and I loved him dearly. Gus’ demise was covered by news helicopters because he gave up the ghost on Highway 17, just where it narrowed to one lane approaching Santa Cruz on a hot Friday afternoon. The ensuing traffic jam was the stuff of legends. So was my parent’s reaction when they saw me on the news that night—at the entrance to the beach, instead of in high school.

Ha! I was 2nd eldest of ten kids. Grounding would have been a pleasure…stuck inside with nothing else to do but read? No, as my mother explained when she took me to the DMV on my 16th birthday and told me not to come back without my drivers license, I was on chauffeur duty. I took sibs to school, picked them up from practice, drove to Sunday School, and any place else they needed to go. After the beach incident, I was the designated driver for EVERYTHING for the next three months.

That’s funny, Barb. 🙂 Your parents were smart. That was grounding in the sense that it limited your ability to do what YOU wanted. Plus, it helped your parents out. Did Gus get towed from the freeway, never to be seen again?

Alas, it was Gus’ last hurrah. His transmission had bitten the dust, and he couldn’t even be pushed aside. The traffic jam was finally cleared when a group of desperate surfers picked him up and moved him to the side of the road. From there it was a trip to the parts lot, never more to be seen by me. It was not, of course, the last time I heard about it however. For many decades, my father continued to mourn for that “perfectly good car…barely 25 years old…” that I “left” at the beach.

I’m glad you had someone to talk to about that review. I had a nasty review and didn’t like it. After thinking about it, I felt that it was more about the reviewer than me or my book. Although, she did attack me, as a person, in her comment, I’ve let it go because her comments made no sense. I hope people will see that if they read her review. I’ve seen Amazon review comments where authors thanked the reviewer or indicated they were sorry the reviewer didn’t like the book. It’s just not something I’d want to do.

I read the DBW article you linked to above. It’s an interesting perspective.